She was completely nude, lying on her stomach in the desert sand, her legs spread wide, her long hair flowing in the wind, her head tilted back with her eyes closed. She seemed lost in private thoughts, remote from the world, reclining on this windswept dune in California near the Mexican border, adorned by nothing but her natural beauty. She wore no jewelry, no flowers in her hair; there were no footprints in the sand, nothing dated the day or spoiled the perfection of this photograph except the moist fingers of the seventeen-year-old schoolboy who held it and looked at it with adolescent longing and lust.
The photograph was in an art-camera magazine that he had just bought at a newsstand on the corner of Cermak Road in suburban Chicago. It was an early evening in 1957, cold and windy, but Harold Rubin could feel the warmth rising within him as he studied the photograph under the streetlamp near the curb behind the stand, oblivious to the sounds of traffic and the people passing on their way home.
He flipped through the pages to look at the other nude women, seeing to what degree he could respond to them. There had been times in the past when, after buying one of these magazines hastily, because they were sold under the counter and were therefore unavailable for adequate erotic preview, he had been greatly disappointed. Either the volleyball-playing nudists in Sunshine & Health, the only magazine showing pubic hair in the 1950s, were too hefty; or the semi-nude Bunnies in Playboy were too plastic; or the smiling show girls in Modern Man were trying too hard to entice; or the models in Classic Photography were merely objects of the camera, lost in artistic shadows.
While Harold Rubin usually could achieve some solitary fulfillment from these, they were soon relegated to the lower levels of the stacks of magazines that he kept at home in the closet of his bedroom. At the top of the pile were the more proven products, those women who projected a certain emotion or posed in a certain way that was immediately stimulating to him; and, more important, their effect was enduring. He could ignore them in the closet for weeks or months as he sought a new discovery elsewhere. But, failing to find it, he knew he could return home and revive a relationship with one of the favorites in his paper harem, achieving gratification that was certainly different from but not incompatible with the sex life he had with a girl he knew from Morton High School. One blended with the other somehow. When he was making love to her on the sofa when her parents were out, he was sometimes thinking of the more mature women in the magazines. At other times, when alone with his magazines, he might recall moments with his girlfriend, remembering what she looked like with her clothes off, what she felt like, what they did together.
Recently, however, perhaps because he was feeling restless and uncertain and was thinking of dropping out of school, leaving his girl and joining the Air Force, Harold Rubin was more deeply detached than usual from life in Chicago, was more into fantasy, particularly when in the presence of pictures of one special woman who, he had to admit, was becoming an obsession.
It was this woman whose picture he had just seen in the magazine he now held on the sidewalk, the nude on the sand dune. He had first noticed her months ago in a camera quarterly. She also had appeared in several men’s publications, adventure magazines, and a nudist calendar. It was not only her beauty that had attracted him, the classic lines of her body or the wholesome features of her face, but the entire aura that accompanied each picture, a feeling of her being completely free with nature and herself as she walked along the seashore, or stood near a palm tree, or sat on a rocky cliff with waves splashing below. While in some pictures she seemed remote and ethereal, probably unobtainable, there was a pervasive reality about her, and he felt close to her. He also knew her name. It had appeared in a picture caption, and he was confident that it was her real name and not one of those pixie pseudonyms used by some playmates and pinups who concealed their true identity from the men they wished to titillate.
Her name was Diane Webber. Her home was along the beach at Malibu. It was said that she was a ballet dancer, which explained to Harold the disciplined body control she exhibited in several of her positions in front of the camera. In one picture in the magazine he now held, Diane Webber was almost acrobatic as she balanced herself gracefully above the sand on her outstretched arms with a leg extended high over her head, her toes pointed up into a cloudless sky. On the opposite page she was resting on her side, hips fully rounded, one thigh raised slightly and barely covering her pubis, her breasts revealed, the nipples erect.
Harold Rubin quickly closed the magazine. He slipped it between his school books and tucked them under his arm. It was getting late and he was soon due home for dinner. Turning, he noticed that the old cigar-smoking news vendor was looking at him, winking, but Harold ignored him. With his hands deep in the pockets of his black leather coat, Harold Rubin headed home, his long blond hair, worn in the duck’s-ass style of Elvis Presley, brushing against his upraised collar. He decided to walk instead of taking the bus, because he wanted to avoid close contact with people, wanted no one to invade his privacy as he anxiously anticipated the hour at night when, after his parents had gone to sleep, he would be alone in his bedroom with Diane Webber.
He walked on Oak Park Avenue, then north to Twenty-first Street, passing bungalows and larger brick houses in this quiet residential community called Berwyn, a thirty-minute drive from downtown Chicago. The people here were conservative, hardworking and thrifty. A high percentage of them had parents or grandparents who had immigrated to this area from Central Europe earlier in the century, especially from the western region of Czechoslovakia called Bohemia. They still referred to themselves as Bohemians despite the fact that, much to their chagrin, the name was now more popularly associated in America with carefree, loose-living young people who wore sandals and read beatnik poetry.
Harold’s paternal grandmother, whom he felt closer to than anyone in his family and visited regularly, had been born in Czechoslovakia, but not in the region of Bohemia. She had come from a small village in southern Czechoslovakia near the Danube and the old Hungarian capital of Bratislava. She had told Harold often of how she had arrived in America at fourteen to work as a servant girl in a boardinghouse in one of those grim, teeming industrial towns along Lake Michigan that had attracted thousands of sturdy Slavic men to work in the steel mills, oil refineries, and other factories around East Chicago, Gary, and Hammond, Indiana. Living conditions were so overcrowded in those days, she said, that in the first boardinghouse where she worked there were four men from the day shift renting four beds at night and four other men from the night shift renting those same beds during the day.
These men were treated like animals and lived like animals, she said, and when they were not being exploited by their bosses in the factories they were trying to exploit the few working girls like herself who were unfortunate enough to be living in these towns at that time. The men in the boardinghouse were always grabbing at her, she said, banging on her locked door at night as she tried to sleep. When she related this to Harold during a recent visit, while he sat in the kitchen eating a sandwich she had made, he suddenly had a vision of what his grandmother must have looked like fifty years ago, a shy servant girl with fair complexion and blue eyes like his own, her long hair in a bun, her youthful body moving quickly around the house in a long drab dress, trying to elude the clutching fingers and strong arms of the burly men from the mill.
As Harold Rubin continued to walk home, his school books and the magazine held tightly under his arm, he remembered how sad yet fascinated he had been by his grandmother’s reminiscing, and he understood why she spoke freely with him. He was the only person in the family who was genuinely interested in her, who took the time to be with her in the big brick house in which she was otherwise nearly always alone. Her husband, John Rubin, a former teamster who made a fortune in the trucking business, spent his days at the garage with his fleet of vehicles and his nights with a secretary who, if referred to at all by Harold’s grandmother, was referred to as “the whore.” The only child in this unhappy marriage, Harold’s father, was completely dominated by his father, for whom he worked long hours in the garage; and Harold’s grandmother did not feel sufficiently close to Harold’s mother to share the frustration and bitterness she felt. So it was mainly Harold, sometimes accompanied by his younger brother, who interrupted the prevailing silence and boredom of the house. And as Harold became older and more curious, more remote from his parents and his own surroundings, he gradually became his grandmother’s confidant, her ally in alienation.
From her he learned much about his father’s boyhood, his grandfather’s past, and why she had married such a tyrannical man. John Rubin had been born sixty-six years ago in Russia, the son of a Jewish peddler, and at the age of two he had immigrated with his parents to a city near Lake Michigan called Sobieski, named in honor of a seventeenth-century Polish king. After a minimum of schooling and unrelieved poverty, Rubin and other youths were arrested staging a holdup during which a policeman was shot. Released on probation, and after working at various jobs for a few years, Rubin one day visited his older married sister in Chicago and became attracted to the young Czechoslovakian girl then taking care of the baby.
On a subsequent visit he found her in the house alone, and after she had rejected his advances—as she had previously done with men when she had worked in the boardinghouse—he forced her into her bedroom and raped her. She was then sixteen. It had been her first sexual experience, and it would make her pregnant. Panicked, but having no close relatives or friends nearby to help, she was persuaded by her employers to marry John Rubin, or else he would go off to prison because of his prior criminal offense, and she would be no better off. They were married in October, 1912. Six months later they had a son, Harold’s father.
The loveless marriage did not greatly improve with time, Harold’s grandmother said, adding that her husband regularly beat his son, beat her when she interfered, and devoted himself mainly to the maintenance of his trucks. His lucrative career had begun when, after he had worked as a deliveryman on a horse and wagon for Spiegel Inc., a large mail-order house in Chicago, he convinced management to lend him enough money to invest in a truck and start his own motorized delivery service, thus eliminating Spiegel’s need for several horses whose performance he said could not match his own. After buying one truck and fulfilling his promise, he bought a second truck, then a third. Within a decade John Rubin had a dozen trucks handling all of Spiegel’s local cartage, as well as that of other companies.
Over the futile protests of his wife, his son was summoned as an adolescent into the garage to work as a driver’s helper, and although John Rubin was amassing great personal wealth at this time and was generous with his bribes to local politicians and the police—“If you wanna slide, you gotta grease,” he often said—he was a miser with the family budget, and he frequently accused his wife of stealing coins that he had left around the house. Later he began deliberately to leave money here and there in amounts that he precisely remembered, or he would arrange coins in a certain way on the bureau or elsewhere in the house in the hope that he could prove that his wife took some or at least touched them; but he never could.
These and other remembrances of Harold’s grandmother, and similar observations that he made himself while in his grandfather’s chilly presence, gave Harold considerable insight into his own father, a quiet and humorless man of forty-four resembling not in the slightest the photograph on the piano that was taken during World War II and showed him in a corporal’s uniform looking relaxed and handsome, many miles from home. But the fact that Harold could understand his father did not make living with him any easier, and as Harold now approached East Avenue, the street on which he lived, he could feel the tension and apprehension, and he wondered what his father would choose to complain about today.
In the past, if there had not been complaints about Harold’s schoolwork, then there had been about the length of Harold’s hair, or Harold’s late hours with his girl, or Harold’s nudist magazines that his father had once seen spread out on the bed after Harold had carelessly left his door open.
“What’s all this crap?” his father had asked, using a word far more delicate than his grandfather would have used. His grandfather’s vocabulary was peppered with every imaginable profanity, delivered in tones of deep contempt, whereas his father’s words were more restrained, lacking emotion.
“They’re my magazines,” Harold had answered.
“Well, get rid of them,” his father had said.
“They’re mine!” Harold suddenly shouted. His father had looked at him curiously, then began to shake his head slowly in disgust and left the room. They had not spoken for weeks after that incident, and tonight Harold did not want to repeat that confrontation. He hoped to get through dinner peacefully and quickly.
Before entering the house, he looked in the garage and saw that his father’s car was there, a gleaming 1956 Lincoln that his father had bought new a year ago, trading in his pampered 1953 Cadillac. Harold climbed the steps to the back door, quietly entered the house. His mother, a matronly woman with a kindly face, was in the kitchen preparing dinner; he could hear the television on in the living room and saw his father sitting there reading the Chicago American. Smiling at his mother, Harold said hello in a voice loud enough that it would carry into the living room and perhaps count as a double greeting. There was no response from his father.
Harold’s mother informed him that his brother was in bed with a cold and fever and would not be joining them for dinner. Harold, saying nothing, walked into his bedroom and closed the door softly. It was a nicely furnished room with a comfortable chair, a polished dark wood desk, and a large Viking oak bed. Books were neatly arranged on shelves, and hanging from the wall were replicas of Civil War swords and rifles that had been his father’s and also a framed glass case in which were mounted several steel tools that Harold had made last year in a manual-arts class and which had won him a citation in a national contest sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. He had also won an art award from Wieboldt’s department store for his oil painting of a clown, and his skill as a wood craftsman was most recently demonstrated in his construction of a wooden stand designed to hold a magazine in an open position and thus permit him to look at it with both of his hands free.
Taking off his coat and placing his school books on the desk, Harold opened the magazine to the photographs of the nude Diane Webber. He stood near the bed holding the magazine in his right hand and, with his eyes half closed, he gently brushed his left hand across the front of his trousers, softly touching his genitals. The response was immediate. He wished that he now had the time before dinner to undress and be fulfilled, or at least to go down the hall to the bathroom for quick relief over the sink, holding her photograph up to the medicine-cabinet mirror to see a reflection of himself exposed to her nude body, pretending a presence with her in the sun and sand, directing her dark lovely lowered eyes toward his tumescent organ and imagining that his soapy hand was part of her.
He had done this many times before, usually during the afternoons when it might have seemed surreptitious for him to close his bedroom door. But, despite the guaranteed privacy behind the locked door of the bathroom, Harold had to admit that he was never completely comfortable there, partly because he really preferred reclining on his bed to standing, and because there was insufficient room around the sink on which to lay down the magazine if he wished to use both hands. Also, and perhaps more important, if he was not careful the magazine might be stained by drops of water bouncing up from the sink, since he kept the faucet running to alert the family to his presence in the bathroom, and also because he occasionally needed additional water for lathering when the soap went dry on his fingers. While the water-stained photographs of nude women might not offend the aesthetics of most young men, this was not the case with Harold Rubin.
And finally there was a practical consideration involved in his desire to protect his magazines from damage: having read in newspapers this year about the more zealous anti-pornography drives around the nation, he could not be sure that he would always be able to buy new magazines featuring nudes, not even under the counter. Even Sunshine & Health, which had been in circulation for two decades and populated its pages with family pictures including grandparents and children, had been described as obscene this year at a California judiciary hearing. Art-camera magazines had also been cited as “smut” by some politicians and church groups, even though these publications had attempted to disassociate themselves from girly magazines by including under each nude picture such instructive captions as, Taken with 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 Crown Graphic fitted with 101 mm Ektar, f/11, at 1/100 sec. Harold had read that President Eisenhower’s Postmaster General, Arthur Summerfield, was intent on keeping sexual literature and magazines out of the mails, and a New York publisher, Samuel Roth, had just been sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for violating the federal mail statute. Roth had previously been convicted for disseminating copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and his first arrest, in 1928, came after the police had raided his publishing company and seized the printing plate of Ulysses, which Roth had smuggled in from Paris.
Harold had read that a Brigitte Bardot film had been interfered with in Los Angeles, and he could only assume that in a city like Chicago, a workingman’s town with a tough police force and considerable moral influence from the Catholic Church, sexual expression would be repressed even more, particularly during the administration of the new mayor, Richard J. Daley. Already Harold had noticed that the burlesque house on Wabash Avenue had been closed down, as had the one on State Street. If the trend continued, it might mean that his favorite newsstand on Cermak Road would be reduced to selling such magazines as Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post, a happenstance that he knew would provoke no protest from his parents.
In all the years that he had lived at home he had never heard his parents express a sexual thought, had never seen either of them in the nude, had never heard their bed creaking at night with love sounds. He assumed that they still did make love, but he could not be certain. While he did not know how active his grandfather was in his sixties with his mistress, his grandmother had recently confided in a typically bitter moment that they had not made love since 1936. He had been an unskilled lover anyway, his grandmother had quickly added, and as Harold had pondered that statement he wondered for the first time if his grandmother had secret lovers. He seriously doubted it, never having observed men visiting her home, or her often leaving it; but he did recall discovering to his surprise a year ago in her library a romantic sex novel. It had been covered in brown paper, and on the copyright page was the name of a French publishing house, and under it the date, 1909. While his grandmother had been taking a nap, Harold sat on the floor reading once then twice the one-hundred-three-page novel, enthralled by the tale and amazed by the explicit language. The story described the unhappy sex lives of several young women in Europe and the East who, after leaving their small towns and villages in despair, wandered into Morocco and became captives of a pasha who secluded them in a seraglio. One day, when the pasha was away, one of the women noticed through the window a handsome sea captain below and, luring him upstairs, made passionate love to him, as did the others in turn, pausing between acts to reveal to the captain the sordid details of their past that had eventually led them to this place. Harold had read the book during subsequent visits so often that he could practically recite certain passages … “Her soft arms were wound around me in response, and our lips met in a delicious and prolonged kiss, during which my shaft was imprisoned against her warm smooth belly. Then she raised herself on tiptoes, which brought its crest among the short thick hair where the belly terminated. With one hand I guided my shaft to the entrance, which welcomed it; with my other I held her plump buttocks toward me …”
Harold heard his mother calling him from the kitchen. It was time for dinner. He put the magazine with its photographs of Diane Webber under his pillow. He replied to his mother, waiting momentarily as his erection subsided. Then he opened his door and walked casually toward the kitchen.
His father was already seated at the table with a bowl of soup in front of him, reading the paper, while his mother stood at the stove talking airily, unaware of the minimal attention she was receiving. She was saying that while shopping in town today she had met one of her old friends from the Cook County tax assessor’s office, which is where she had once worked, operating a Comptometer. Harold, who knew that she had left that job shortly before his birth seventeen years ago, never to work again outside the house, commented to his mother on the fine aroma of the cooking, and his father looked up from his paper and nodded without a smile.
As Harold sat down and began sipping the soup, his mother continued to talk, while slicing beef on a sideboard before bringing it to the table. She wore a housedress, little makeup, and smoked a filter-tipped cigarette. Both of Harold’s parents were heavy smokers, smoking being their only pleasure insofar as he knew. Neither of them was fond of drinking whiskey, beer, or wine, and dinner was served with cream soda or root beer, purchased weekly by the case.
After his mother had seated herself, the telephone rang. His father, who always kept the phone within reach at the dinner table, frowned as he grabbed it. Someone was calling from the garage. It happened almost every night during dinner, and from his father’s expression it might be assumed that he was receiving unwelcome news—perhaps a truck had broken down before making its delivery, or the Teamsters union was going out on strike; but Harold knew from living in the house that the grim, tight-lipped look of his father did not necessarily reflect what was being said on the telephone. It was an inextricable part of his father’s nature to look sullenly upon the world, and Harold knew that even if this phone call had come from a television game show announcing that his father had just won a prize, his father would react with a frown.
Still, despite whatever genuine aggravation was inherent in managing the Rubin trucking business, his father got up diligently at five-thirty each morning to be the first on the job, and he spent his days dealing with problems ranging from the maintenance of one hundred forty-two trucks to the occasional pilferage of cargo, and he had to deal as well with the irascible old man, John Rubin, who personally wanted to control everything, even though the operation was now too big for him to do so.
Harold had recently heard that several of Rubin’s drivers had been stopped by the police for driving without license plates, which had infuriated the old man, who ignored the fact that his stinginess had caused this: trying to save money, he had purchased only thirty-two sets of license plates for his hundred forty-two trucks, requiring that the men in the garage keep switching the plates from vehicle to vehicle or risk making deliveries without plates. Harold knew that sooner or later this scheme would result in a court case, and then his grandfather would try to bribe his way out of it and, even if he was lucky enough to do so, it would probably cost him more than if he had paid for the proper number of plates in the beginning.
Harold vowed that he would never work full time in the garage. He had tried working there during the summer but had soon quit because he could not tolerate the verbal abuse from his grandfather, who had often called him a “little bum,” and also that of his father, who had remarked sourly one day, “You’ll never amount to anything.” This prediction had not bothered Harold because he knew that the price of appeasing these men was total subjugation, and he was determined that he would not repeat the mistake of his father in becoming subservient to an old man who had sired a son he had not wanted with a woman he had not loved.
After his father had hung up the telephone, he resumed eating, revealing nothing of what had been said. A cup of coffee was placed in front of him, heavy with cream as he liked it, and he lit up an Old Gold. Harold’s mother mentioned not having seen their neighbors from across the street in several days, and Harold suggested that they might be away or vacation. She stood to clear the table, then went to check the fever of her younger son, who was still sleeping. Harold’s father went into the living room, turned on the television set. Harold later joined him, sitting on the other side of the room. Harold could hear his mother doing the dishes in the kitchen and his father yawning as he listlessly watched television and completed the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. He then stood, yawned again, and said he was going to bed. It was shortly after nine o’clock. Within a half hour, Harold’s mother had come into the living room to say good night, and soon Harold turned off the television and the house was soundless and still. He walked to his bedroom and closed the door, feeling a quiet exuberance and relief. He was finally alone.
He removed his clothes, hung them in the closet. He reached for the small bottle of hand lotion, Italian Balm, that he kept on the upper shelf of his closet and he placed it on the bedside table next to a box of Kleenex. He turned on the bedside lamp of low wattage, turned off the overhead light, and the room was bathed in a soft glow.
He could hear the wind whipping against the storm windows on this freezing Chicago night, and he shivered as he slipped between the cool sheets and pulled the blankets over him. He lay back for a few moments, getting warm, and then he reached for the magazine under his pillow and began to flip through it in a cursory way—he did not want to focus yet on the object of his obsession, Diane Webber, who awaited him on the sand dune on page nineteen, but preferred instead to make an initial pass through the entire fifty-two-page issue, which contained thirty-nine nude pictures of eleven different women, a visual aphrodisiac of blondes and brunettes, preliminary stimulants before the main event.
A lean, dark-eyed woman on page four attracted Harold, but the photographer had posed her awkwardly on the gnarled branch of a tree, and he felt her discomfort. The nude on page 6, sitting cross-legged on a studio floor next to an easel, had fine breasts but a bland expression on her face. Harold, still on his back with his knees slightly raised under the blankets, continued to turn the pages past various legs and breasts, hips and buttocks and hair, female fingers and arms reaching out, eyes looking away from him, eyes looking at him as he occasionally paused to lightly stroke his genitals with his left hand, tilting the magazine in his right hand to eliminate the slight glare on the glossy pages.
Proceeding through the magazine page after page, he came to the exquisite pictures of Diane Webber, but he quickly skipped over them, not wanting to tempt himself now. He moved on to the Mexican girl on page twenty-seven who sat demurely with a fisherman’s net spread across her thighs; and then to the heavy-breasted blonde reclining on the floor next to a small marble statue of Venus di Milo, and on to a lithe, lovely blonde standing in the shadows 1/25 sec. at f:22 of what appeared to be an empty stage of a theater, her arms crossed under her chin and above her upturned breasts, which were gracefully revealed, and, in the very subtle stage lighting, Harold was quite certain that he could see her pubic hair, and he felt himself for the first time becoming aroused.
If he were not so enamored of Diane Webber, he knew he could be satisfied by this willowy young blonde, satisfied perhaps more than once, which to him was the true test of an erotic picture. In the stacks of magazines in his closet were dozens of nudes who had aroused him in the past to solitary peaks, some having done so three or four times; and some were capable of doing it again in the future as long as they remained unseen for a while, thereby regaining their sense of mystery.
And then there were those extremely rare pictures, those of Diane Webber, that could fulfill him constantly. He estimated that his collection contained fifty photographs of her, and within a moment he could locate every one of them in the two hundred magazines that he kept. He would merely have to glance at the cover and would know exactly where she was within, how she was standing, what was in the background, what her attitude seemed to be during that special split second when the camera had clicked. He could remember, too, first seeing these pictures, could reconstruct where and when he had bought them; he could practically mark a moment in his life from each of her poses, each being so real that he believed he knew her personally, she was part of him, and through her he had become more in touch with himself in several ways, not merely through acts which Victorian moralists had defined as self-abuse, but rather through self-acceptance, his understanding the naturalness of his desires, and of asserting his right to an idealized woman.
Not able to resist any longer, Harold turned the page to Diane Webber on the dune. He looked at her, lying on her stomach, her head held up into the wind, her eyes closed, the nipple of her left breast erect, her legs spread wide, the late-afternoon sun casting an exaggerated shadow of her curvaceous body along the smooth, white sand. Beyond her body was nothing but a sprawling empty desert—she seemed so alone, so approachable and available; Harold had merely to desire her, and she was his.
He pushed the blankets off his body, warm with excitement and anticipation. He reached under his bed for the wooden stand he had made in school, knowing that his manual-arts teacher would be astonished to learn what use would be made of it tonight. He placed the magazine on the stand in front of him, between his knees and widely spread legs. Raising his head, supporting it on two pillows, he reached for the bottle of Italian Balm, poured lotion into his palms and rubbed it between his hands momentarily to warm it. Then, softly, he began to touch his penis and testicles, feeling the quick growth to full erection. With his eyes half closed, he lay back and gazed at his glistening organ towering in front of the picture, casting a shadow across the desert.
Continuing to massage himself up and down, up and down, back and forth across his testicles, he focused sharply on Diane Webber’s arched back, her rising buttocks, her full hips, the warm place between her legs; and he now imagined himself approaching her, bending down to her, and determinedly penetrating her from behind without a word of protest from her as he thrust upward, faster, faster, and upward, faster, and suddenly he could feel her pounding back against his thighs, her hips moving from side to side, he could hear her sighs of pleasure as he tightened his grip around her hips, faster, and then her loud cries as she came in a series of quick convulsions that he could feel as fully as he now felt her hand reaching back to hold his tight testicles exactly as he liked to have them held, softly, then more firmly as she sensed the throbbing, shuttering start of sperm flowing upward and gushing out in great spurts that he grabbed in both hands as he closed his eyes. He lay very quietly in bed for a few moments, letting his muscles relax and his legs go limp. Then he opened his eyes and saw her there, as lovely and desirable as ever.
Finally he sat up, wiped himself with two pieces of Kleenex, then two more because his hands still were sticky with sperm and lotion. He rolled the tissue into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket, not concerned that his mother might recognize it in the morning when she emptied the baskets. His days at home were numbered. In a matter of a few weeks, he would be in the Air Force, and beyond that he had no plans.
He closed the magazine and placed it on the top of the pile in his closet. He put the wooden stand back under the bed. Then he climbed under the covers, feeling tired but calm, and turned out the light. If he was lucky, he thought, the Air Force might send him to a base in Southern California. And then, somehow, he would find her.
. . .
In 1928, the mother of Diane Webber won a beauty contest in Southern California, sponsored by the manufacturers of the Graham-Paige automobile, and one of the prizes was a small part in a silent film directed by Cecil B. De Mille in which she portrayed the coy and pretty teenage girl that in real life she was.
She had come to California from Montana to live with her father who, after the bitter breakup of his marriage, had quit the Billings Electric Company and found work as an electrician in Los Angeles with Warner Bros. studios. She was much closer to her father than her mother, and she also wanted to escape the harshness of the rural Northwest where her parents had so often quarreled, where her grandmother had been married five times, and where her great-grandmother, while swimming in a river one day, was killed by an arrow shot into her back by an Indian. She had arrived in Southern California convinced that it would offer more fulfillment than the limited horizons of the great-sky country.
And it did, in most ways, even though she would never achieve stardom in the several films in which she appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her satisfaction came rather from a sense of serenity she felt in Los Angeles, a sunny detachment from the grim girlhood she had known in Montana. In Los Angeles she felt free to pursue her whims, to revive her early interest in religion, to walk in the streets without wearing a bra, eventually to marry a man who was almost thirty years older and then, seven years later, to take a second husband who was five years younger. Southern California’s characteristic disregard of traditional values, its relatively rootless society, its mobility and lack of continuity—the very qualities that had been a painful burden in her family’s past in Montana—were accepted easily by her in Los Angeles, partly because she was now sharing these newly accepted values with thousands of her own generation, pretty young women like herself who had left their unglamorous hometowns elsewhere in America and had migrated to California in search of some vaguely defined goal. And while very few of these women would succeed as actresses, or models, or dancers—more likely they would spend their best years working as cocktail waitresses, or receptionists, or salesclerks, or as unhappily married women in San Fernando Valley—nearly all of them remained in California, and they had children, children who were reared in the sun during the Depression, who played outdoor sports the year round during the 1940s, who matured in the period of great California prosperity that began with World War II (when American defense investments poured millions into West Coast aircraft plants and technological industries); and by the 1950s there had emerged in California a new generation that was distinguished for its good looks, its casual style in dress, its relaxed view of life with an emphasis on health, a special look that on Madison Avenue, throughout the nation and overseas was regarded as peculiarly American—the California Look. And among those who possessed this look in the 1950s, though her mother was among the last to recognize it, was Diane Webber.
Diane’s problems with her mother began after her parents were divorced. Diane’s father, twenty-seven years older than her mother, was a writer from Ogden, Utah, named Guy Empey. He was a short, stocky, imperious, adventurous man who had joined the United States Cavalry in 1911, and, because his country was late in becoming involved in World War I, he joined the British Army. He saw frontline action in Europe, earning battle scars that he would proudly wear on his face the rest of his life, and in 1917 he wrote a bestselling book about his experiences called Over the Top, which sold more than a million copies. It also became a film, which he directed and in which he played the lead.
Guy Empey wrote other books during the next decade, though none nearly as popular as the first, and by 1930 he was reduced to writing pulp fiction for magazines, often under pseudonyms. It was around this time, at a social gathering in Hollywood, that he met the small, spry, twenty-year-old actress from Montana whose short dark hair, large brown eyes, and infectious smile reminded him of the silent-screen star, Clara Bow. He quickly courted her with bouquets of flowers, took her for rides in his Cadillac touring car, and soon he had proposed marriage—and she accepted, although at forty-six he was as old as her father.
Unwisely, he moved his bride into the home he shared with his beloved mother and sister, to whom he had dedicated Over the Top. Both were cultured, sophisticated women from New York—his mother’s uncle, Richard Henry Dana, had written Two Years Before the Mast; and his widowed sister, who had been married to a top executive with W. & J. Sloane, read the New Yorker each week and had filled the Los Angeles house with fine furnishings and a wonderful library that she had brought with her from across the country. These two women, and particularly Guy Empey’s strong-willed mother, were not overly impressed with the little actress from Montana, and he was unable or unwilling to resolve a growing marital conflict that was only briefly interrupted in the summer of 1932 by the birth of their only child, who was named, after a song then very popular, Diane.
When Diane was two, her mother separated from her father; when she was five, after a brief reconciliation, her parents were divorced, and Diane spent the ensuing years dividing her time between two households. During the week she lived with her mother, who in 1939 married a handsome man of twenty-four who had worked as a photographer for the International News Service and had modeled in a cowboy outfit on billboards advertising Chesterfield cigarettes. At the time of the marriage he owned a small restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and Diane’s twenty-nine-year-old mother repressed whatever lingering movie ambitions she still had, as she joined her new husband and worked as a waitress.
On weekends Diane would ride the trolley from the Hollywood Hills over to Echo Park, where her grandmother would meet her and escort her to her father’s house; there, with the music of Handel softly playing on the phonograph, she would dwell in the intellectual presence of her aunt and grandmother, who encouraged her to read widely, who took her to proper films, and who were forever using words that sent her searching through the dictionary. As the women took their daily afternoon naps, and as her father worked at his typewriter—with a minimum of success—Diane would sit alone in her room quietly reading everything from Anthony Adverse to the plays of Shakespeare, from the Arabian Nights to Gray’s Anatomy, acquiring gradually a strong if erratic classical background as well as an intense sense of fantasy.
Her fantasies were formed more clearly one afternoon after she had been taken to the ballet The Nutcracker. From then on, in her dreams, Diane saw herself as a glamorous girl in tights, twirling alone onstage in a graceful pirouette. She began taking ballet lessons once a week after school, but this was a privilege that her mother granted on the basis of Diane’s personal behavior and how well she performed various chores around the house. Her stepfather, with whom she felt uncomfortable, would often watch her as she practiced at home, would sometimes gently tease her as she held onto the mantle in the living room and pointed a leg high into the air. This sight did not please her mother who, having already objected to her young husband’s attempt to display Varga pinups in the hallway, certainly was no less amused by the attention he now was giving to her budding twelve-year-old daughter. Late one afternoon, in a moment of petulance that shattered Diane, her mother remarked that it was most unlikely that Diane’s beauty would ever match her own.
The situation at home quickly worsened for Diane later that year when her mother gave birth to a son; and, two years later, to a baby daughter. Although Diane was approaching her teens, was becoming curious about boys and dating, she was expected to return home after school each day to help care for the children. This routine had continued more or less until she had graduated from high school, whereupon she left home to live temporarily in the apartment of her mother’s sister, earning money for her keep and dancing lessons by working as a gift-wrapper in the Saks department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Months later, not wishing to further intrude upon the privacy of her maternal aunt, who was then dating a married man who worked in the office of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Diane moved into the Hollywood Studio Club, where her mother had once lived, a residence for women in the movie industry. It was there that Diane learned of an audition for chorus dancers willing to work in a nightclub in San Francisco, and while this was a dubious opportunity for an aspiring ballet dancer, she had concluded that she was probably already too old, at eighteen, and far too undertrained, ever to master the delicate physical art that she performed with such perfection in her fantasies. So she appeared at the audition and passed the test. When she approached her mother to ask if she could accept the position, her mother replied, “Don’t ask me. Make your own decision.” Diane left for San Francisco not knowing whether her mother had granted her independence or was expressing indifference.
Diane earned eighty dollars a week for doing three shows a night, six nights a week, dancing in the chorus behind such headline talents as Sophie Tucker. She wore a modest costume that revealed only her bare midriff, but while changing backstage she became exposed for the first time to group nudity, and she could see how her body compared to those of other women. It compared very well, and she was therefore not surprised when a friend in the chorus suggested that Diane might earn extra money as a figure model, and she gave her the name of an art professor at Berkeley who had paid other dancers twenty dollars for a brief photographic session in the nude.
Timidly, Diane appeared at the professor’s residence, but his detached, formal manner soon put her at ease. She removed her clothes and stood nude before him, watched him back away and heard the camera click. She heard it click again and again, and without any instructions from him she began to move like a ballet dancer, her arms slowly reaching, her body turning, twirling on her toes as she heard interior music and the camera click, and she was no longer aware of the professor’s presence. She was aware only of her body as an inspired instrument that she artfully controlled, and with which she could rise beyond her limitations. Though nude, she did not feel naked; she felt internalized as she danced, private, alone, deeply involved with emotions that might be projected externally in her movements or expressions, but she did not know, she did not contemplate what effect she was having on the professor behind the camera. She could barely perceive his fuzzy gray figure in the distance. Diane had her glasses off, and she was quite myopic.
Returning to Los Angeles after completing the nightclub engagement, Diane took the initiative and telephoned various fashion photographers who were listed in the classified directory, asking for an appointment. She called such men as David Balfour and Keith Bernard, Peter Gowland and David Mills, William Graham and Ed Lange, among others. Nearly all were attracted to her and were impressed by the fact that a young woman of such wholesome appeal would so willingly pose in the nude—she was at least ten years ahead of her time; by 1953, when she turned twenty-one, her photographs began to be seen in nudist and camera magazines all over the country, and around the world.
But since these publications paid very little, she was constantly in need of a job when there were no dancing assignments available. Briefly, she operated the elevator in the May Company store on Wilshire and Fairfax, managing to put aside some money for her mother toward the parochial-school expenses of her half-brother. Diane next worked as a receptionist at KHJ-TV, where one day she heard from a fellow employee that the president had seen her picture in a nudist magazine and was making inquiries concerning her moral habits, but she was never confronted personally. Finally, in what would prove to be a job of personal significance, she found nighttime work as an IBM operator in a check-clearing house of the Bank of America in downtown Los Angeles. There were several young women operating the machines, and a tall quiet man who served as the supervisor.
From the first time she saw him, she liked the way he moved. He had a soft, sensuous stride, like that of a big cat, and she noticed his calves, his narrow hips, and strong buttocks. As she watched him proceed down the aisle, between the rows of shiny gray machines, she was not so concerned that he might suddenly turn around and catch her as that he might turn around and disappoint her—she had yet to see his face. Diane continued to watch him, amazed that she could now be doing this, peering intently through her glasses at the posterior of a man, a perfect stranger, appraising him in a purely physical way.
He turned around. She was relieved. He was handsome, almost too handsome. He had deep-set hazel eyes, a strong chin and mouth, and a nose that she thought might be a bit too turned up. As he headed back in her direction, looking at a stack of cards he held in his hand, she guessed that he was at least six feet and not more than three or four years older than she. She stood facing him as he approached, but he walked right past her without even noticing.
It was not in the nature of Joseph Webber to look at women in a way that was obvious or revealing. He had done so once, as a young boy in Mitchell, South Dakota, and the consequences had been as dark and tumultuous as the midsummer dust storms that regularly attacked that farming region, creating mounds of dirt so high that the cattle were able to climb the fences.
The storm resulting from Joseph Webber’s childhood indiscretion occurred because he and a little girl in his first-grade class, with whom he had been exchanging glances earlier in the day, decided after school to satisfy their curiosity about one another’s bodies in a place where they thought they would not be noticed. But they were, by an enraged teacher, who quickly reported the act to Joseph Webber’s mother, who in turn beat him with such vengeance and expressions of disgust that he will never forget it. He was relieved some months after the incident when his father decided to leave that land of poverty and bad memories and to pack the Model A Ford with what few valuables the family had and move on to Southern California.
The family rented a little house in a section of Los Angeles now called Watts, and Joseph’s father found work as a combination superintendent and janitor in a music-and-arts building. His mother, always a woman of religious conviction, became deeply involved with faith healing in Southern California, and sometimes on weekends Joseph would accompany her to the Christian Science church to hear services that were also attended by the author Guy Empey and his daughter.
In grade school and high school, Joseph was bright and well liked but also very shy. Not having a car in this city meant that he was socially immobile. He thought of a career in forestry, having taken summer jobs in the woods and liking the close contact with nature. But after graduation in 1946 he decided to join the paratroopers, which he thought might enhance his image as a man of decision.
Riding the train across the country with other young recruits bound for military training in Aberdeen, Maryland, Joseph Webber suddenly heard someone yell out that they were now passing a nudist camp. Everybody jumped up to look, including Joseph, but all he could see through the train window was a green blur of trees racing by. He had missed it. And as the recruit who had made the announcement proceeded to dramatically describe the details to the others in the aisle, Joseph went back to his seat and sat thinking quietly. He was strangely excited by the image of men and women, all gathered in the nude, basking openly in the sun, surrounded by nature and isolated from the confinements of city life. It seemed to him so healthy and honest, somehow so liberating.
On training missions with the 11th Airborne Division, Joseph Webber jumped out of airplanes eleven times, but on the ground he did nothing that could be described as daring. Sent to join the American occupational forces in Japan, where the triumphant spirit following the military victory still overshadowed moral doubts about the bomb, Joseph felt no pride in conquest and merely did his job. Once, with other paratroopers, he went to an Oriental bathhouse, but the American officers had made sure that no women were in sight; and the ghoulish films about gonorrhea that Joseph had been shown nullified whatever curiosity he might have had about Oriental females.
He returned home from the service older but not much wiser. During his absence, his parents had separated; his mother was still deeply into religion, and his father was working in the busy Lockheed plant in Burbank. Because of the GI Bill, Joseph was able to continue his education, going first to Mexico City College, where he had a pleasant first sexual experience with a young woman; and then the following year he transferred to Occidental College in the Los Angeles suburbs, where a member of the faculty approached Joseph during his final school year and asked if he was interested in joining the CIA. With the newspaper headlines now featuring stories about the Cold War, and with alleged Communist agents having infiltrated the American government, the universities, and the Hollywood entertainment industry, the CIA seemed to Joseph to be as respectable a place as any for a former paratrooper. He sent in his application. But for reasons never explained, he was turned down.
It was also at this time, early in 1953, that Joseph got a job after class working in the clearinghouse of the Bank of America. The building was convenient to where he lived, and he found the atmosphere congenial. On his first night, he noticed a stunning blonde operating one of the IBM machines. He was drawn to her, but did nothing. Weeks passed before he became aware of the young brunette wearing glasses who had been watching him; and he might never have paid much notice if he had not been visited one night at work by an old friend from the 11th Airborne, who, while they were chatting during a coffee break, asked, “Who’s the good-looking chick with the dark hair and the great body?”
Joseph pondered, and, after his friend had gone on to describe the bespectacled young woman who could only be Diane, he confessed to having little knowledge of her except that she seemed pleasant and, he felt sure, quite modest—a conclusion that he had just made on the basis of her clothes, so unrevealing that he had never wondered about the female figure within.
The following night, Joseph asked Diane for a date that weekend. They went to an art film and got along well, though Diane found him guarded and reserved, qualities she normally preferred in a man, though not in a man she found so attractive. On subsequent dates they discovered things they had in common—their love of the outdoors, swimming, hiking, communicating with nature. Then Diane discussed her experience as a nude model and, while Joseph listened in his characteristically unrevealing way, he could feel his excitement and mounting curiosity, remembering his thoughts on the troop train years ago as it raced past the nudist camp somewhere in Maryland. And now this very demure and modestly attired operator of an IBM machine was telling him quite plainly that she had posed for dozens of photographers entirely in the nude.
The couple dated often after that, and soon Joseph had seen for himself the body she possessed and how glamorous she appeared outdoors on beaches with her glasses off and her long hair blowing freely in the wind. Although they engaged in heavy petting and gratified one another sexually in several ways, they did not have intercourse during the first six months of their courtship. She had not yet made love to a man, she confided one night, and Joseph was not yet sure he wished to become involved to a point that might risk marital expectations—an attitude very common in the fifties. He also was aware that Diane’s condition was a valuable commodity, the last word being precisely the one he used in explaining to her why they should wait, get to know one another for a while longer before risking for her the loss of what another man, her husband, might cherish.
And so the nude photographs of Diane Webber that, to Harold Rubin in Chicago, had seemed so virginal were, in fact, the photographs of a virgin.
. . .
Much to his disappointment, Harold Rubin had not been assigned by the Air Force to a base in California. After a brief assignment in Texas, he was sent to Belleville, Illinois, near St. Louis, and then on to Minneapolis, which had winters even more miserable than Harold had known in Chicago. Despite the military’s attempt to channel his energies toward noble attainments as a file clerk, Harold Rubin found time to remain in close contact with Diane Webber throughout 1957, purchasing various magazines in the towns adjacent to the bases; he soon became aware that he was not the only man in the United States Air Force who coveted her.
He had, in fact, already met several airmen who, after he had displayed one of her pictures, obviously knew as much about her as he did. They not only knew her name and certain biographical facts, but Harold could also tell from the look in their eyes that they probably did what he did at night under the blankets, though he was sure that they would never admit it. It was also possible, Harold thought, that half his generation was privately hooked on her, and perhaps even old married men had images of her while making love to their wives. But none would admit it. Men do not revel in such admissions.
Harold also sensed from a few recent photographs that Diane Webber was somehow changing physically. Though as stunning as ever, her hips seemed a bit fuller, her breasts seemed larger in some photographs than in those that he remembered from Chicago. In one picture that he had seen since joining the Air Force, he could swear that she was in the early stages of pregnancy. But one could not be sure when looking at the pictures, because sometimes poor printing quality distorted a model’s figure, and there also was no way of knowing how old some of the pictures were. Most—but not all—of the nudist and camera magazines displayed a date on the cover, but there was no indication as to when the photographer had taken the picture; so a picture that Harold Rubin was seeing of Diane Webber in 1957 might have actually been taken three or four years before, a likelihood that did not detract from her mysterious quality, nor did it lessen his confusion.
Returning to Chicago following his discharge, and finding his father as remote as ever, Harold moved out of the house and rented his own apartment. Though he had no specific career in mind, he had sometimes thought, while perusing camera magazines, that he might like to try photography. He did not believe that he yet possessed the capacity in self-denial to function as a photographer of nudes, but he had long recognized his interest in art and design, and, noticing an advertisement in the newspaper calling for a Photostat operator in a studio, he answered it and got the job.
Harold’s social life in Chicago began auspiciously one Saturday afternoon when, while browsing through an antique bookshop, he noticed an attractive older woman working behind the counter. She appeared to be about thirty, ten years older than himself. Having never dated anyone older than eighteen, and feeling suddenly courageous, he approached the woman and asked if she would go to a movie with him that night. She accepted with a smile; and after seeing the film she invited him home, asking if he cared to spend the night. The fact that she lived in Berwyn close to the home of Harold’s parents and announced that she was the divorced daughter of a local judge merely added to the ecstasy of the occasion.
Harold lived with her for a year and will remember her always as his most inspired sexual partner. She taught him things that he had never imagined despite his having read a large percentage of the hardcore sex novels that had been published in recent years, and he was pleased with her satisfaction in him. He was also fond of her young children, who lived in the house, and who, after hearing their mother exclaim in the kitchen one morning, “Harold, you’re the best medicine I’ve had,” proceeded to call him Mr. Medicine.
On Saturday afternoons, Harold would mow the lawn around the house, walking bare-chested with his broad back itching from the scratches she had placed there the night before and the night before that. Soon their relationship was the scandal of Berwyn, with neither Harold’s mother nor the judge being able to put an end to it, though both tried. One afternoon when the judge’s daughter was having coffee in a place patronized by local politicians and business leaders, a man sought to embarrass her by asking in a loud voice, “Tell me, just what do you see in that punk Harold Rubin?” Without hesitating, she replied in an equally loud voice: “Harold Rubin is the best lay in the western suburbs.”
In addition to the sexual gratification and confidence that Harold gained as the complimented lover of a mature woman, the affair also signified a turning point in his life. For the first time, in this small conservative community in which he had been reared, he was revealing a rebellious attitude that he had long felt but only now was willing to acknowledge openly.
As he walked behind the noisy lawn mower, displaying a tattoo on his left arm from his Air Force days and the love scratches on his back, he was declaring himself not only sexually but politically. Sex was political, he thought. Sex was used by the government as a way of regulating people. In the name of public morality, the government invaded the private rights of people by legislating what they could read, what films they could see, what they could think. Since no government had ever been able to prove that people who saw sex films or read sex books were then inspired to commit sex crimes—a rapist like his grandfather had probably never read a book of any kind in his entire life, Harold felt sure—the government tried to justify its anti-pornography laws on the theory that the public’s exposure to pornography might promote lustful thoughts. And it was on this basis that the police raided certain sex films, that the FBI confiscated truckloads of sex magazines, and postal inspectors classified as unmailable certain magazines that Harold liked to look at.
If he wished to masturbate to these magazines in his bedroom, he believed that it was his right to do so. It should be of no concern to the government, or to the Catholic Church which, along with certain fundamentalist and orthodox religions, still considered masturbation a sin, if no longer a medical link to impotence or insanity. Signs of human insanity, he believed, were not to be found in sexual acts but in military acts, such as when soldiers dropped bombs on people they did not know, killing people with whom they had no personal quarrel. That seemed insane to Harold Rubin. But such behavior did not seem to concern the government moralists and religious leaders as much as did a photograph of a copulating couple.
But Harold was also aware that many people in America were now beginning to challenge these “moralists,” a fact that was being documented almost daily in the press, and he sensed that a sexual revolution was simmering with the arrival of the sixties and that he was part of it—he and the judge’s daughter, Diane Webber and Hugh Hefner, the news vendor on Cermak Road, and many thousands of anonymous people who in various ways were reacting against attempts to control their sex lives and the inspirations of their fantasies. Harassment by the police of sex-magazine distributors was continuing, however, and Harold had read that the December, 1959, issue of Playboy had been ordered off the stands in several northern California cities because a police chief in San Mateo thought that the photograph of an embracing couple was not in “good taste.”
In Chicago, Mayor Daley’s vice squad had arrested fifty-five news vendors for selling sex magazines, among them Sunshine & Health and Modern Man, but the national distributor of these publications refused to pay the fine. The case went before a jury, with the national distributor hiring as its attorney a Los Angeles lawyer named Stanley Fleishman, who had argued against censorship in front of the United States Supreme Court. The trial in Chicago was widely reported in the press, and Harold had read every word.
On the first day of the trial, the lawyer had noticed that in the front rows of the courtroom several women were sitting with their eyes lowered; they appeared to be knitting or to be manipulating something in their hands that he did not immediately recognize. On closer inspection, Fleishman saw that these women were all holding rosary beads and, in full view of the jury, were praying. The lawyer concluded that these women had been brought there by an organized church group, and, after protesting loudly to the judge, the women were ordered to the back rows.
The trial went on for several weeks, with witnesses for both sides expressing varying views on the question of morality and freedom. Given the influence of church groups and the Daley regime in Chicago, Harold was not optimistic about the conclusion of the trial. But to his pleasure and surprise, the jury of seven men and five women, after deliberating for almost six hours, voted to acquit the distributor of sex magazines. After the verdict had been announced, the judge seemed stunned, then slumped forward from the bench. He was rushed to a hospital. He had had a heart attack.
If there were signs of improvement in the city of Chicago, none had yet reached Harold Rubin’s family, particularly the home of his grandmother. Though she was now sixty-five and suffering from a variety of ailments, she nonetheless became alive with rage at the mere thought of her husband, about whom she spoke endlessly during each of Harold’s visits. His grandfather was now living almost full time with his mistress, was lavishing gifts upon her, was handing out bribes to visitors he met in the kitchen on certain afternoons; and yet, she went on, he denied her a housekeeper and complained at the cost of an occasional cleaning lady. He was the world’s most selfish man, she said; he ignored her small needs while he had amassed millions—some of which, she confided, was kept in cardboard boxes in the basement. She revealed this in a way that left little doubt in Harold’s mind that, if he took some of it, he would be doing her a favor—it would be small retribution for all the misery that she had been subjected to by the old miser who had raped her fifty years ago.
If a grandmother seeking revenge had ever found a willing accomplice, she had found one now in Harold Rubin. Going to the basement and helping himself to the first box he could find, he walked off with close to $60,000. Saying good-bye to his grandmother, Harold went directly to a Cadillac dealer and purchased a new black convertible. Without pausing at his apartment, he drove south through Indiana and Kentucky, deciding to take a quick vacation in Florida. Along the way be bought clothes and shaving equipment, registered in the best hotels he could find, and was a generous host to several women he met in bars and restaurants.
In Fort Lauderdale, he rented an expensive apartment, purchased a stereo, leased a red Cadillac convertible for the lady who shared his bed. He proceeded to give nightly parties for the new friends who surrounded him and indulged in every hedonistic adventure that money could buy—until early one morning, with hard raps on the door, the police arrived. After arresting him on charges of grand larceny, the police searched the apartment for what remained of the money. They found none of it, having failed to disassemble the air-conditioner and search the filter.
Back in Chicago, in the presence of his lawyer, the police, and his smoldering grandfather, Harold denied any involvement in the theft, as had his grandmother. The following day, after reading about the incident in the newspapers, the district director of Internal Revenue sought to learn whether Harold’s grandfather had paid taxes on the money. This question petrified the old man, who now feared that Harold might be aware of the larger cache, which in turn could lead to an extensive IRS investigation of the whole trucking operation. John Rubin suddenly lost his enthusiasm for a conviction, and, lacking evidence, the case was dropped. Harold Rubin was free. Disowned, but free.
Regular employment, which had never been one of his consuming ambitions, eluded Harold Rubin during much of the 1960s. Not knowing exactly what to do in life, he contented himself by doing nothing much of the time. The job he held longest—two years, eight months—was the one for which he was the least qualified emotionally. It was that of a private investigator, a quasi cop, a watchdog on wrongdoers like himself; it was a perfect job for a hypocrite, he thought bitterly, as he took it, justifying his decision because he needed the money and had been told by the employment agency that nothing else was available. He thought that he would quit it in a matter of days or weeks, but he did not. He had lost much of his confidence and spirit since the judge’s daughter had left him for an older man.
After that relationship Harold had become involved with a young, impressionable blonde who worked as a clerical assistant in a doctor’s office, and he quickly asked her to marry him. She did, but soon her mother convinced her that it had been a mistake, and the marriage ended in less than a year. It was also during this period that Harold learned for the first time of Diane Webber’s marriage and the fact that she had a son. This uninspiring news had appeared in a magazine he had seen in a cigar store in downtown Chicago, a special eighty-page issue that was devoted entirely to her; it contained more than one hundred photographs—including several with her husband and son—and extensive biographical material that listed facts and dates about her modeling career and her private life.
Harold bought the magazine and took it to his apartment. Flipping through it, he recognized many of her nude photographs from the past, except now he was feeling differently about them. She was still beautiful, and she could easily arouse him, if he would let her; but he did not want that now. He concentrated instead on reading the biographical text, the many pages of type from which he learned her date of birth—July 27, 1932—the names of her parents, the schools she had attended; and also included on these pages were several snapshots from the family album, one showing her as a round-faced baby wearing a white cotton dress and a fragile batiste bonnet, being held in the arms of her stylish 1930s mother, smiling with dark eyes shaded by a wide-brimmed felt hat, wearing a white linen dress with a V neck and a strand of graduated pearls. There were photographs of Diane as a teenager at Hollywood High, where she had appeared in operettas and had served as the school choreographer; and in the middle of the magazine were the nude photographs that Harold had first seen in 1956 and 1957, but now he realized that these had been taken years before that, when her surname had been Empey. After her marriage to Joseph Webber in 1955, the editors of the camera and nudist magazines that Harold used to buy on Cermak Road had begun using her married name with many nude photographs that had been taken years before her marriage, so that Harold had really been obsessed all those years by another man’s wife.
Harold looked at the pictures of Joseph Webber in this special issue, reluctantly conceding his good looks. There were photographs of Diane and Joseph Webber swimming together, sailing together, walking together in nudist camps in Southern California. In some pictures the couple had posed with their son, John, who had been born in February of 1956; and as Harold read this magazine now, in the winter of 1965, he realized that the boy was already nine years old.
Harold put the magazine aside. It was depressing. He was sorry that he had bought this issue devoted to Diane Webber because the editors had made her mundane. In showing her wearing clothes or a bathing suit in several pictures, they had dated her with the fashion of the period, whereas Harold had always seen her as a timeless beauty. All the facts about her family background, her husband and son, all the statistics and the proof of her existence in everyday reality had, for Harold Rubin, made her less real. The magazine had spoiled a perfect relationship. It had domesticated a dream.
It was while in this state of mind, filled with self-doubt and loneliness, that Harold Rubin, twenty-five years old, became a private investigator. And during the next three years, while the national headlines were describing the exploits of a new generation that was challenging the established order, was protesting racial inequality and inspiring a social and sexual revolution that he had once briefly identified with, Harold spent his days wandering through department stores trying to spot shoplifters, working in factories observing workers that management thought were stealing equipment, tailing married people who were suspected by their mates of infidelity. It was suitable employment for a disillusioned man, a job whose purpose was to obtain evidence to confirm other people’s deceptions, to destroy the illusions they were seeking to preserve. While the job catered to his curiosity about people, it also filled him at times with feelings of paranoia, an abhorrence of the petty management policies of many large companies, and doubts about the wisdom of marriage.
He rented a new apartment farther from the city, away from the political counterculture and the police who were now busily preparing to protect the site of the Democratic National Convention. He moved into a modern complex near O’Hare Airport, a tenant encircled by transience, and he sought ephemeral pleasure from the most ephemeral of females, the airline stewardesses. He dated one of them several times, and one night in the apartment after making love she agreed to let him photograph her in the nude. He used the camera that he carried with him in the street occasionally when following a married person who was presumed to be en route to a romantic rendezvous.
One afternoon while Harold was walking on the North Side of Chicago, he noticed a building on Belmont Avenue with a sign outside that read “The Studio.” Entering it, he saw two young women sitting in a reception room and near them sat a middle-aged man behind a desk on which were displayed several Polaroid cameras. This was a nude-model studio, the man explained after Harold had asked; for twenty dollars, a model would pose in the nude for fifteen minutes in one of the back rooms, with the customer borrowing one of the Polaroids. Harold, who had never known of such a business before, was told that this was the only place of its kind in Chicago, although there were several like it in California and New York, some of which also offered body-painting and massage privileges.
Harold paid the money and selected a camera. He followed the model through a long dark corridor to a room in the rear. She was a tall redhead, not very pretty. She was chewing gum. She wore a mini-skirt, a flowered T-shirt, and no bra. In the corridor Harold could hear voices coming from behind the closed doors of several rooms. Business was thriving, he thought, and he was fascinated.
After she had closed the door behind him, and they had exchanged comments, she removed her clothes and stood casually against a white wall. When Harold’s camera was ready, she proceeded to strike various poses: hands on hips, arms held behind her head, a view from the side, a view from the rear—it was a very perfunctory performance, and the sign on the wall warning customers against physical contact with the models was, in Harold’s case, wholly unnecessary. It was not the model’s looks that he objected to as much as her indifferent manner and her rasping voice. Nude women in magazines are better, he thought. They do not have rasping voices, and they do not chew gum.
Still, the existence of this business in Chicago intrigued him. He left knowing that he would probably return. But as he approached the building on his next visit, he saw a police car pulling away from the curb. When he entered the studio he heard the disgruntled owner telling the models that he was quitting—he had just received a second summons and the next might mean jail. Without hesitation, Harold stepped forward and introduced himself. Then, speaking privately to the man in the corner, Harold volunteered to manage the studio for a small salary and relieve the owner of legal concerns. Harold was enthusiastic and convincing. He suddenly knew that he belonged in this garish place that flaunted nudity and attracted opposition from the police.
He had finally found a controversial political issue that he could identify with personally, one that might release his repressed rebelliousness. Bored with his life as an investigator, he now wanted action in this age of activism that exploited in the media the brutal style of Mayor Daley’s police at the recent Democratic convention, during which numerous demonstrators had been beaten with clubs and dozens had been arrested.
To be arrested now was a mark of distinction, he thought, and he had read that even Diane Webber had spent weeks in a federal courtroom in Iowa; a postal obscenity case had been brought against a California distributor of sex magazines, including one that showed Diane walking nude out of the surf with one leg raised just high enough to be revealing. The distributor’s lawyer, Stanley Fleishman, who had once successfully defended sex magazines in Chicago, had lost this case in Sioux City to a jury composed of farmers’ wives—the men selected for jury duty had all avoided it, saying that they had to harvest the crops—but Fleishman later won the case on an appeal.
Harold Rubin’s appeal to the owner of the studio was equally successful, and, after resigning from his job as an investigator, he began a controversial career in the service and sale of sexual fantasy. Using his talents in carpentry and design, he redecorated the studio in a Gay Nineties motif, using Victorian posters, brass spittoons, old-style drugstore medicine bottles, and several other items that he had purchased cheaply in various local junk shops. He hired new models who were more attractive and attentive, one being a friend of the airline stewardess he had dated, others being college students or dropouts who were into the counterculture and were sexually liberated in ways that few young people had dared to be in the relatively prim 1950s, before the popularity of protest and birth-control pills.
As business increased, the police returned to threaten Harold Rubin. But he offered no bribes, saying only that he would take the case to court if arrested. Health and fire inspectors also visited the studio regularly and issued summonses for alleged violations, which Harold corrected if possible or otherwise ignored. When some models quit because they were unnerved by the harassment, he hired others through advertisements in newspapers or by approaching young women he saw in the streets. One day he misdialed a phone number and found himself conversing with a perky young woman who lived nearby on the North Side and who, after agreeing to meet him, accepted a job at the studio and quickly became the customers’ most popular model.
She was a slender, blue-eyed brunette named Millie, and she was as adventurous as she was lovely. Soon she and Harold were living together.
On weekends during the summer of 1969, they would drive out to one of the forest preserves in Cook County where, in secluded places in the woods, Harold would take nude pictures of Millie, posing her in the exact way that he had seen Diane Webber in magazines years ago. Harold once made a sexual home movie with Millie and another studio model—both women were bisexual—and he answered ads in swingers’ publications with Millie; they experienced group sex and acted out every fantasy either of them had ever had. Not since the judge’s daughter had Harold found such an exciting partner, and in 1970 he and Millie decided to open up their own studio, using money that Harold had saved in addition to a substantial loan from a wealthy Chicago businessman who had been one of the studio’s regular customers.
Harold did not merely want a model studio, he wanted a sexual supermarket that would offer a wide assortment of commodities and services for sale: erotic books and magazines, vibrators, dildos, and other sexual gadgets; and in the rear of the building, private massage rooms equipped to show X-rated video films. He intended to decorate the place like a church, in dark wood of Gothic design and with several ecclesiastical objects that he knew would not endear him to Mayor Daley or the police. But he did not care. Harold Rubin was now possessed by a feverish spirit of rebellion against all authority in Chicago. And, after renting an empty store on South Wabash Avenue, he proceeded to build his blasphemous emporium.
From a wrecking company that had demolished a Catholic church on the South Side, he obtained a delicately carved section of ornate window tracery, a few prayer benches and other ornamental objects including a six-hundred-pound dark Gothic confessional in which he planned to have Millie sit while greeting the arriving customers. He arranged to buy erotic books and magazines, sexual equipment and films from a Chicago distributor who would obtain most of the merchandise from California. In order to protect his stock from shoplifters, who, he assumed, would be as prevalent in his place as they had been in the stores he had patrolled as an investigator, Harold bought several small television monitors that he hid high along the walls behind the wooden Gothic fixtures.
As a safeguard against the police, Harold established his business as a private club that customers could join only after they had produced verifiable identification papers and had signed a document stating that they were not affiliated with any law enforcement agency intending to entrap him or deprive him of his constitutional rights to freedom of expression—a statement that customers were not only required to sign but also to read aloud in front of the confessional, unaware that their voices were being recorded by a hidden microphone, and their faces were being filmed by a camera peering through the folds of the purple velvet draperies that hung within the confessional.
Reasoning that his uncommon business required an uncommon name, one that would both attract attention and be easily remembered, Harold considered a name given him by an airline stewardess who lived in his building. One night he had appeared outside her apartment, drunk and noisy, wearing only a nineteenth-century Prussian spiked helmet, and carrying a medieval shield and a mace; the stewardess opened the door, and, after looking at him momentarily in astonishment, she said, “You know something, Harold, you’re really weird.” After that she had regularly referred to him as “Weird Harold,” or just called him “Weird” for short, and he liked the name. Now in 1970 he decided that the name perfectly described his place—Weird Harold’s.
He used it in his corporation papers, in the telephone directory, on his business cards; and in January of 1971, he used it on the announcements that he sent out to local newspapers and television stations inviting them to a press party before the opening. Weird Harold Rubin received extensive publicity then, and he continued to receive it in the years since then, as he became engaged in a series of skirmishes with the police because of his outlandish behavior and his alleged violation of the law. He was arrested for not having a massage license. He was twice convicted for selling obscene books, the second offense resulting in a $1,200 fine and a judicial order that he produce three thousand “non-dirty” paperback books to be given to the Cook County Jail. Early in 1973, he displayed in his front window a sign reading, DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS US, which he was forced to remove. In 1974 he sent a masseuse to streak through city hall in his home community of Berwyn. In 1975, during a garbage strike in Berwyn, he was publicly accused of dumping a cubic yard of horse manure on the steps of the city hall, and, while he denied the charge, he liked the publicity.
His antics and obsessions, his endless confrontations with the law, eventually became too enervating for Millie, who, after marrying him and producing a son, abandoned Harold and moved to Florida. He became infuriated. He refused to give up the son he cherished, and he placed a public notice in Screw, the sex newspaper, announcing that he was no longer responsible for any debts incurred by his wife.
For a while, he cared for his son in the sex shop, letting the little boy pedal his tricycle among the customers who were waiting for a massage or were browsing through the erotic books and magazines displayed on the shelves—which Harold believed was an atmosphere more healthy for a child than the restrictive one imposed on him by his own puritanical upbringing. When his son became five, Harold drove him to kindergarten each morning and arranged for a nurse to care for the boy until Harold returned at night to the suburban apartment, which he shared with a masseuse.
The apartment was close to the home of his eighty-year-old grandmother, whom he visited regularly. While he often spoke with his mother, he had not spoken to his father in years. His grandfather died in 1974 at the age of eighty-eight, but neither Harold nor his grandmother attended the funeral.
Harold Rubin’s apartment is decorated in the same 1890s style that characterized the first model studio he managed. On the walls are turn-of-the-century posters, an advertisement for Fatima cigarettes, and, neatly framed, ten shares of stock in the Stutz Motor Car Company. There are antiques in the living room, including several chairs and sofas older than his grandmother; a still-functioning Edison phonograph built in 1910, a wooden icebox, a Packard jukebox, an equally old Pulver chewing-gum machine, and other items resembling those advertised in the Spiegel mail-order catalog back when his grandfather had made deliveries by horse and wagon.
In his bedroom, Harold still keeps, carefully preserved, magazines with the nude photographs of Diane Webber. Though he looks at them less often than he did when he was younger, he knows each photograph in each issue; and his knowledge of her present life and age has not diminished her freshness for him. To this day, despite all that he has built in a business that is an extension of his boyhood bedroom, he acknowledges that he has never found in real life anyone who has fulfilled for him the desire that Diane Webber created.
. . .
Diane Webber is now forty-three years old. She lives on an exquisitely designed sailboat in Southern California with her husband of twenty years, both having decided to give up their apartment on Malibu Beach for the greater freedom of life on the sea.
Their son, John, who is nineteen, lives and works in a nudist colony in the hills southeast of Malibu, a colony called Elysium Fields, which is owned by a former photographer named Ed Lange, a tall, fifty-five-year-old man with an elegantly trimmed gray beard. Lange had been born in Chicago, but he left in the 1940s to come to California, where he became the most prolific photographer of nudes in America. It was he who took most of the pictures of Diane Webber which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.
Diane Webber’s father, the writer Guy Empey, died at seventy-nine in 1963 in a veterans’ center in Wadsworth, Kansas, leaving his military papers and his medals to the men in the ward. Diane’s mother, who is sixty-five, still works in the little restaurant on Sunset Boulevard with her second husband.
The restaurant is surrounded by studios—Columbia Pictures, Hollywood Film Enterprises, United Recording—and the many performers and technicians who patronize the restaurant call her Pat, which was her name on the silent screen, and not Marguerite, which was her name at birth in Montana. But on the walls of the restaurant are hung reproductions of drawings and paintings by Charles Russell of the Old West, of the Montana that she had eagerly left nearly a half century ago.
Diane rarely sees her mother, for the trips she takes away from the harbor and the sailboat are in another direction, toward the Valley, where she teaches classes in belly dancing almost daily at Everywoman’s Village in Van Nuys, still displaying remarkable body control as she demonstrates a difficult movement to her pupils while her upraised hands click rhythmically with bell-bronze finger cymbals. On special occasions she performs before an audience, adding to her mystery as she adorns her alluring figure in a long, flowing scarf and a low hip-hugging brocaded skirt jingling with a belt of coins; and as the flutes, drums, and strings resound with Middle Eastern music, her body turns and undulates in a way that is unabashedly sexual.
On such occasions, her husband, who works as a technician on educational films, is often in the audience; and recently, after one of her exotic performances, a man who had known the Webbers for a while and was aware of the stimulating effect caused by her nude photographs asked her husband, the individual who knew her most intimately, what she was really like.
Joseph Webber pondered the question momentarily. He does nothing in haste. And then he softly replied, “She is everything you have ever imagined.”